William Jefferson: From Gallstones to Keystone

If you’re like me, you can’t read the name William Jefferson (1876-1946) without your brain involuntarily supplying “Clinton” after it. It’s a conditioned response, it can’t be helped. But there is a workaround! For the actor was sometimes billed as “William Winter Jefferson”, “William W. Jefferson” or “W.W. Jefferson”, and the added middle helps to break up the flow. Anyway the surname is a significant one. He was the son of the major American stage star Joseph Jefferson, the brother of actors Joseph Jefferson Jr and Thomas Lockyer Jefferson, and a distant relation to Stanley Jefferson, better known to posterity as Stan Laurel.

William had originally intended to become a doctor, and studied for the purpose in Germany, but could not resist the lure of the family trade. He toured with his father and William H. Crane in his early days. By 1896 his standing was sufficient to gain him membership in The Lambs. In 1901 he married Christie MacDonald, who later became a major star in her own right. After the Jefferson patriarch died in 1905, William appeared on Broadway in the plays The Catch of the Season (1905), Welcome to Our City (1910), The Senator Keeps House (1911), and revival of A Fool of Fortune (1912).

In 1913 he married Broadway actress Vivian Martin and the two went to Hollywood to break into pictures. Martin was to become the bigger star. Jefferson has about three dozen screen credits through 1919, some of them pretty decent, such as the 1916 Keystone comedies He Did and He Didn’t and Bright Lights, with Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand; and The Other Man and His Wife’s Mistakes, with Arbuckle and Minta Durfee. That same year there was also A Dash of Courage, with Charley Chase, Gloria Swanson, and Wallace Beery, and The Habit of Happiness (1916) with Douglas Fairbanks. Dramas he appeared included Camille (1915) with Clara Kimball Young, and William Desmond Taylor’sOut of the Wreck (1917). He returned to Broadway for two more plays, She Walked in Her Sleep (1918) and Three Showers (1920). By 1928 Jefferson had retired and moved to Honolulu, where he died 18 years later.

For more on silent comedy please read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.